A Georgia Raised Garden

3 Materials

$4000

2 Weeks

Advanced

Andrea and I had a big potted garden on our terrace, and it was getting bigger. What started as basil and mint was turning into tomatoes, carrots, squash, ginger, avocado... the list goes on. We were running out of room! So, we decided to go raised garden. And we went all in! This project took about two weeks to complete, mainly because my friend Delaey and I could only work from 6-9 in the morning and 6-9 at night to avoid the Georgia summer heat. In the end, we have a beautiful garden that lights at night and will be the perfect spot for us to both grow and consume all the vegetables, fruit, and herbs we want!

We have more posts on this project focusing on filling the beds and adding pavers and irrigation. See them here:

Our back terrace was running out of space for our potted garden. So, we decided to go raised garden. And we went all in!

Here's a view from the main back yard. It nestles up to the house, but commands its own space.

The vision was for a square garden with L-shaped corners. This image came from Google Maps. Great resources for high level planning.

The before was a hedge that had gotten way too crazy.

We removed it in one afternoon, in the Georgia summer heat. Man did we sweat that day!

Then we had to remove the stumps in the ground left from old trees and the hedges that we had just cut down. Totally worth it to hire a professional for the stump grinding. He was in and out in about an hour.

The first box goes in. We built a whole box first to learn all the tricks of making building faster, the important ways to keep things straight, and any design changes we needed to make. You always learn a lot by building a prototype.

The others went in much faster than the first.

Then we thought, what if we had a little shade. We took our inspiration from Japanese gardens. Cranking up the Zen!

The first steps in building the arbors hinted at what the final design would look like.

Close to finished. The arbors really define the space.

From the side you can just see the strings of lights we put up. We plan to add pavers in and around the garden, and use the central area for dinners.

Have a question about this project?

I absolutely love your garden! I live in the country and I’ve had three back surgeries so my husband put nine raised beds for me isn’t that sweet because I cannot bend over. Now my raised beds are tall there about 4 to 5 feet off the ground so how do you think I could use the same plan only with higher beds?I love the lights and I want to have dinner out there at mine too!

Are they solar lights or electric sting? Beautiful!!! How do/ will u pull from the top? Or are u planting fruit/ veggies that hang an pull squash cucumbe, tomato 🍅 fabulous idea!!! What will be on ground floor?? Besides a wonderful bestie or table chairs, bench? Great work for sure! Thank You for sharing!